JulianRota
6d ago
Disagree, look at the 60s and 70s.
By "this era" I did mean after the 60s and 70s era of political unrest. Not sure of an exact date actually, I guess after the relatively domestically peaceful 80s and 90s. Though I suppose you'd then have to overlook the OKC bombing, which is maybe reasonable, since it was more anti-government than anti either political party or tribal side.
That wasn't anymore fabricated than a typical sting operation. Maybe you're against police stings in general, but it's common. Happen with drugs, prostitution, money laundering, child pornography honeypots, fake assassination hiring sites etc.
I'm not against police stings in general, but there's most definitely a line they have crossed at times where it seems more like they're enabling or encouraging crime that wouldn't otherwise happen instead of thwarting people with serious intent to commit major crimes. I don't know about the case you cited in particular, but they have definitely done this with so-called Islamic terrorists too. In this case they "befriended" some developmentally disabled teenager and eventually cajoled him into sending pitifully small amounts of money to somebody he believed was associated with ISIS, then busted him and patted themselves on the back for "stopping ISIS". Do you think that's an appropriate use of police resources?
Exactly where the line is for this is a bit fuzzy. But I think a good indicator that you're way off on the wrong side of the line is when multiple defendants get acquitted after a successful entrapment defense.
JulianRota
7d ago
I don't know all of these for sure, but:
Pelosi's husband being attacked.
I don't think there was any indication the attacker was a conservative who hated them for being liberal. As I recall, it was more like some sort of dispute between friends or possibly lovers.
The kidnapping plot against Whitmer.
You mean the one that was entirely fabricated by FBI informants?
And Luigi Mangione is the only one that deserves an asterisk?
I think this might qualify as the most explicitly political violence yet to happen in this era of political division. Depending on who they turn up as the shooter, presuming that they do eventually.
JulianRota
17d ago
I finished reading Kurt Schlichter's American Apocalypse, about a second American Civil War, written pretty recently, so it doesn't feel ridiculously out of touch with current events. He's a red-team author, so naturally the book has the red team side be the good guys and win the war. It repeats the style from his previous book The Attack of being written from the perspective of a post-event author doing interviews with a series of participants in the event in a variety of different positions, so it's effectively a series of moderately connected short stories. I found it an engaging and enjoyable read, and much more fleshed-out with regard to how things actually progress and escalate than most other new civil war stories.
The way things escalate towards a hot war seems to paint the Blue side as maximally bad and the Red side as only as bad as they are forced to be. I enjoy reading that, but it does feel a bit improbable I suppose. It doesn't soft-petal how nasty such a war would be likely to be too much - it includes such things a double-digit millions of innocent Americans dying due to starvation and disease from collapse of food and healthcare logistics and both blue and red militias and guerillas treating civilians who oppose them poorly. It ends with a red "Special Security Force" department which confiscates all of the possessions of blue-teamers who were too influential, sometimes locks them into "reeducation camps" and forbids them from ever having an important job again until they earn a "rehabilitation certificate". It seems to take the position that, yeah, there isn't traditional American free expression anymore, but what else are you going to do when the Blues take advantage of that to weaponize every institution, seize power, and horribly abuse ordinary Americans. Not exactly something I'd care to endorse now, but maybe in a world where the events portrayed in the book actually did happen.
I do notice that it doesn't pay attention to a number of aspects of what I think would actually happen if there was ever actually a new Civil War. Not much detail about what actual Mexican Cartels and other large organized gangs would do in such a situation, besides a one-liner about how Mexican Cartels took over Arizona in that world. Or Islamic militants or other religious issues for that matter. Not much about race either - I don't think there's anywhere near as much racism in Red ideology as the Blues would have you believe, but there isn't none, and wars tend to enable the craziest people to really let their crazy flag fly. I suppose it's a bit much to expect to cover that stuff in a book that's supposed to be red meat to the actual Red Team.
I've also been trying to read Scott Horton's Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. It's basically okay, but rather long and repetitive so far in my opinion. I'd like to read like like 50-100 pages or so of a steelman of how American diplomacy backed Russia into a corner, in their opinion at least, but I'm not sure I care to slog through ::checks listing:: 2,316 pages of it. Wow, didn't realize it was quite that long. Maybe I probably won't actually finish that one after all.
JulianRota
17d ago
I do live in New York, but just saw this. Wouldn't have been able to make it anyways, I just flew back in from Europe last night at like 10:30pm.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Along the lines of what Amadan said, I think you need to first think about what the long-term future looks like with all of the options you are considering.
Say the woman at least intends to be genuine and the baby is real and actually yours, and you actually move there and attempt to raise a family. Do you really know this woman well enough to know what a long-term relationship with her would look like, across such a huge gap in culture and wealth? I don't know what you did with her over those weeks, but did you really see her in enough situations to get a feel for who she really is? Do you speak any of the local language at all? And what of your friends and family and any career you may have here in the US (assuming you were born and raised in the US, or wherever else you're from), what will they think of you when you tell them you're moving to the Philippines to marry and raise a family with a local stripper? What if it ends up not working out and you have to move back?
Or say you go along with the idea that the kid is real and yours and you want to support it. This will be an obligation for decades, and it will almost certainly come out eventually. What if, 8 years from now, you get into a serious relationship with a regular woman in your actual home city? She will eventually find out that you're sending money to and communicating with someone in the Philippines. What will you tell her and what will she think of you as a result of that?
Or option 3, you just block and ignore her from now on and completely forget about her, possibly sending money for an alleged abortion before doing so. This option closes the door on this unfortunate situation for good. Nothing in your current life or future will be affected by it, nobody will know except your own conscience and the people of the Motte here.
When you think about it like that, I think it's clear that Option 3 is the only real choice. Does it feel a little bad? Yeah maybe. But you acted like a total douchebag travelling to the Philippines and having unprotected sex with a third-world sex worker in the first place. There's nothing to do now but complete the act and ditch her. There's no magic pill to get out of this cleanly for you. If you feel bad about it, congratulations, you've discovered that you are not actually a total douchebag. Therefore, cease doing douchebag things. It's not really that bad in the grand scheme of things - you screwed up, but you've learned some about who you are and why you should not do certain things. And yeah, 95% chance she's scamming you and the kid is fake or not actually yours, and if it's the other 5%, well she's in the business and not a little kid, she should damn well know this is a possibility by now, and if not, it's about time she learned. Either way, she already has a big family and 2 kids, she'll be okay in the long run whatever the actual deal is here.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I don't know if you're particularly interested in the "foreign resistance fighter memoir" thing, but I did actually read that book. In my opinion, it was a moderately interesting memoir with very little in the way of actual political opinions at all, aside from an opposition to Russian expansionism. I don't see any reason at all to "cancel" it besides ridiculous hysteria about "nazis".
Which of course completely reversed overnight when Russia did actually invade Ukraine full-scale, at which point Azov battalion suddenly becomes glorious heroes, regardless of how much Nazi imagery and terminology they use, and the Canadian Parliament gives an award to an actual Ukrainian Waffen SS member for fighting against Russia in WWII.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I've considered writing something similar in the more general department of how fiction affects peoples' worldviews. I see it a lot in terms of discussions on criminal justice in particular.
My impression from the sources I've read that seem to accurately reflect the "average" case rather than cases or regions cherry-picked for some particular reason is that around 90% of all people charged with crimes in the United States are guilty as sin and busted dead to rights. Meanwhile, huge numbers of people seem to believe things like that most people are innocent or crazy serial killers are everywhere or something like that, because all their knowledge comes from fictional media optimized for drama, and documentaries that cherry-pick outrageous cases and exaggerate how outrageous they are.
JulianRota
2mo ago
On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.
"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.
"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?
JulianRota
2mo ago
What I haven't seen much commentary on yet is, will Adams and/or Cuomo run against him as an independent? I figure, winning the Democrat nomination makes Mamdani a shoo-in by default in the general. To have a shot at defeating him would probably require a temporary alliance between a very substantial number of more centrist Democrats and pretty much all of the Republicans to all vote for one particular alternate Democrat running as independent. Having a shot at that actually working seems much less likely if both Adams and Cuomo run, especially if they start openly attacking each other.
JulianRota
4mo ago
Not at all, in fact it's fantastically rare. I think it's just another example of the thing where only ridiculous and outrageous stories of misbehavior get written, upvoted, and shared. The vast majority of them work perfectly fine basically all the time, but nobody tells stories about that.
I live in a decently nice condo building with a board that does maintenance, upkeep, and upgrade of common areas. They all seem perfectly reasonable and competent, and nothing dramatic has ever happened as far as I know. They're all up for re-election every year, but board meeting attendance is fairly low and virtually nobody ever runs to challenge any of the existing officeholders. They seem more barely able to muster enough man-hours to take care of all the things that they ought to than to have a ton of extra time to hassle people over random stupid stuff.
It's been my experience in real life that nobody I've ever met in person had this sort of thing happen to them. Basically everybody in real life will look at you like you're crazy if you express an opinion that it's likely enough to happen to take precautions against. I think that's a much more reliable measure about how much of a risk something actually is than how often you see stories about things on the internet or in the news.
JulianRota
4mo ago
Some people are just crazy, or, to be a bit more charitable, have vastly different preferences and styles from you in life and relationships.
When meeting people IRL, there's a lot of screening that happens before the conversation, like being at whatever place you met at all, seeing the other person's appearance and behavior before you actually talk, etc. Online dating exposes you to a lot of people who wouldn't have passed those filters at all. So you've got to learn to do that filtering yourself.
In other words, keep firmly in mind what kind of woman you actually want and what kind of relationship you want with her, and reject women who don't seem to match that. Nobody is going to give you a pile of gold stars for going on the most dates. If you're already feeling like you're tiptoeing around and weirded out over text conversation, reject and move on, as an in-person date is likely to be a waste of your time. I'd definitely put being excessively complimentary and sexual before you've met at all in that category.
JulianRota
4mo ago
As a adult man with no kids, I don't think there really are any hard and fast rules, only preferences.
My preference is already to pee in bathrooms. If that's impractical for some reason and I really need to, then I'll do it somewhere else. I would also prefer to do things like only on nature, at least a few yards into some woods, reasonably hard for others to see, etc, but then necessity and lack of availability of good options can override that.
Best recent example was during Covid times in NYC. For a while, it was legal for bars to serve drinks to pedestrians, but not to let anyone inside, so my friends and I would all walk around drinking. No bathrooms open anywhere means when you need to pee, you try to find somewhere reasonably low-traffic and discrete and do it. If you think this doesn't make a lot of sense, I agree, but I didn't make the rules. I guess that's the price for temporarily sort of containing a disease with a 99.9% survival rate (/s).
JulianRota
4mo ago
Are you talking about the "Home" screen recommendations? I agree that it's an annoying layout, but don't you have the "Library" page too? On mine, that shows only your books, with a bunch of layout options. Mine also never actually goes to the "Home" screen unless I actually tap on Home to go there, so I only really ever see the "Library" page. So it doesn't really seem like that big of a deal to me.
Agreeing to pay less than the normal price in exchange for seeing ads is one thing, but it does bug me when the big providers pull a "we are changing the deal", like Amazon Prime video's apparent stance that they will actually start showing ads unless you agree to pay them even more. Fortunately, for now at least, uBlock Origin Lite, which is Manifest V3 compatible, works fine at blocking them, and YouTube ads too.
JulianRota
4mo ago
What ads are you talking about? I just got a new Kindle, and I don't see any ads at all. Just go to Library on the front page, it stays there, and you only see your actual books and their contents. If you go to the Home page, you see some recommendations, which I suppose you could consider ads, but it doesn't ever seem to switch over to that from Library by itself.
Of course, there is the option to save a few bucks on the purchase price in exchange for seeing ads. I hate ads as much as anyone, but I don't have a lot of sympathy if somebody takes the $20 cheaper option for ads and then complains about the ads.
JulianRota
5mo ago
Finished War at Every Door. It seems to me to be more of an overview of guerilla resistance practiced by both sides in East Tennessee in the American Civil War. A little light on the details of what motivated each particular person and how they came to their views, but I suppose that's a bit difficult to know. It's more of a high-school history class level overview of people, places, incidents, and times, but at a high enough level that I found it interesting and easy to keep up with reading.
What I'm more interested in is any evidence to support or refute the theory that the Borderer elements of the American South were never all that into slavery, secession, etc, and it was all a Cavalier thing. After reading this book, I don't think that theory is specifically proven or refuted, but remains a possibility. It does seem to have some possible jumping-off points for further research on the subject, which I may or may not try my hand at at some point.
The book does seem to have a "both sides" view. Both the Confederate and Union armies experienced guerilla resistance and tried various methods to deal with it, some working better than others. The guerilla resistors mostly hassled civilians supporting the other side and small groups of soldiers and civilian Government representatives from the side they were against. They sometimes tried more direct interference with larger-scale military operations, which was mostly of very limited effectiveness and brought down harsh reprisals - the most direct example is the Unionist attempt to burn several bridges early on in the war, which would have impeded the movement of the Confederate armies northward to defend against a then-planned Union invasion (Wikipedia summary). This did not go well and mostly lead to a number of executions by hanging after court-martial.
JulianRota
5mo ago
Gonna +1 on hire a lawyer to write your will. I gotta figure, if you have enough money to actually care about where it goes when you die, paying a tiny bit for an actual lawyer to do it is a no-brainer.
JulianRota
5mo ago
It is possible to meet girls in a bar. Having any success at doing so is all about stuff like your looks, how they're feeling that night, how funny and interesting you are to them, etc. Offering to buy her or her whole group a drink only works against you, as it makes you seem like a sucker who's too boring to just have a conversation with somebody, and will make you waste the critical first few minutes on boring stuff like figuring out what they want, getting the bartender's attention, placing the order, etc.
If they ask you to buy them a drink, 90% it's this guy is lame, let's see if we can milk him for a free round before we ditch him, and the other 10% is a shit test. It's never in your interest to go along with it.
The bottom line is always, only go to a bar and drink there if it's actually fun for you, regardless of whether there are any girls there or you might stand a chance of getting with them.
JulianRota
5mo ago
Finished Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. Found it interesting and a sufficiently unique perspective. Goes on a lot about how a core problem was the refusal of the British Army to really take action against Loyalist militias due to lack of resources and competing demands from height of the Cold War NATO to keep sufficient troops in Europe to counter any possible Soviet large-scale invasion. In addition to all of the usual problems often seen in COIN operations. The British Army didn't seem to spend too much effort on the problem-class of, unit builds up some local relationships, then rotates out after 6 months, new unit rotates in and has to start the relationship-building thing from scratch. Possibly inter-linked with the issue of apparently British Army divisions having their own independent identities and cultures not necessarily tightly linked with any other Army Division.
Also started and finished Blue Dawn which I found from the thread 2 weeks ago. I think I generally like the genre of Red-team action fiction, and I liked the Kelly Turnbull books, but this one just didn't seem that appealing to me. It seemed kind of cringe at times, the premise a little too farfetched. It's not like the Turnbull series isn't farfetched, but it seems to have the vibe of being deliberately and un-self-consciously absurd in a way that I find entertaining and funny.
Now reading War at Every Door, on the splits within the Confederacy in the American Civil War, which I found from this response to one of my older comments (I do get around to this sort of thing eventually, if not always right away). Just started it, but it seems there was a lot more internal dissent and resistance on both the Confederate and Union side than most popular summaries of the war pay attention to.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Pucker up and start kissing some asses!
There's a thing where large hierarchical organizations may have "clans". One or more lower-level workers are loyal to a higher-level patron. They back all of their patron's plays, let them take credit for everything good, deflect blame for anything bad, rat on any other subordinates who aren't with the program, etc. In return, the patron promotes his loyalists with him, gives them plum assignments, protects them from poor reviews and layoffs etc, if only so they can keep on backing him. Pick somebody who seems like they might be such a patron and start kissing some ass.
Just be clear all around, you're looking for somebody prepared to promote for loyalty, not competence. Don't ever display enough independent competence that you're at risk of being promoted without your patron. Swallow your pride and your ego. You're not gonna be buddies with your co-workers either, you need to be selling them out at any opportunity. And obviously, get away from any potential patron who fails to hold up their side of the bargain. With a little bit of luck and skill, you can eventually rise pretty high like this without ever being particularly competent or qualified at anything.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Finished Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef. It was a fun read IMO, but surprisingly weak on story structure. His other 2 Dan Kilmer books go along with the standard 3-act story structure, where there's a "main" story and all of the subsidiary action is revealed later on to play a part in shaping how the "main" action plays out. This book was more like a bunch of stuff just happens as his improvised band of merry sailors travels the world, and it's all interesting, but doesn't really connect together into a broader plot. It also seems to attempt to push a little harder into the background of exactly how the whole world fell apart in this alternate timeline, which just doesn't really make any sense to me. Seems like he's sticking with the trucks, trains, boats, etc just stopped coming, nobody's even going to try to explain why or account for the fact that this just doesn't ever happen in the real world, and even if the US goes completely crazy for some reason, why would China, Russia etc do so too? Oh well, no sense over-analyzing things I guess.
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles.
JulianRota
7mo ago
I think that might be true, but is more of a story about how terrible the rest of Europe is than how awesome the Ukraine Army is.
I would expect at least some units are these days excellent at things like holding off a large-scale offensive with a hodgepodge of improvised equipment and donated castoffs. They might now be among the best in the world at modern drone warfare.
On the other hand, they still seem terrible at putting together a solid combined-arms offensive of the type that would be necessary to actually drive the Russians out of their country.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Exactly which part is awful? Keeping in mind the order in which these things have been done.
I'm willing to agree that local jurisdictions actively obstructing enforcement of immigration law is awful. Lots of left-leaning jurisdictions have been doing that for decades though.
Dismissing criminal indictments is pretty bad too. But if it's the only stick they've got that's big enough to get them to stop obstructing immigration enforcement, I can live with it. I don't exactly love it, but if that's where we're at now, well then okay I guess.
JulianRota
7mo ago
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. Nothing else new or particularly interesting so far.
Also reading Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef as more light entertainment. It's pretty heavily red-team coded fiction. As is typical with his books, I enjoy the plot generally, though I find the specific collapse / apocalypse scenarios described to be highly implausible.
JulianRota
8mo ago
Finished Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Curiously, it did actually end only a few dozen pages after I was like, wait, where is this book going for the next half. I guess it does actually have a massive amount of footnotes and citations etc.
Now reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. This one focuses more on the internal workings of the British Army and how they (mis)handled the situation. It calls out more directly how they failed to respond to Loyalist terrorism.
This book raises one other point so far that I found very interesting and hadn't actually read anywhere else. They claim that the early Provisional IRA, prior to Bloody Sunday, the Falls Road Curfew and other notable incidents, when the membership was still very low and public support in the Catholic community for them much more slim, did actually undertake operations to deliberately provoke the British Army into more heavy-handed responses in the hopes of creating those sorts of incidents in order to increase public support for their tactics and goals and grow their own membership. That's not exactly something you read much about in accounts more sympathetic to the PIRA, and I'm curious to see what if any evidence they have for this.
Okay that sounds like a reasonable take, I missed getting an update on that event sufficiently long after it happened for the truth to actually come out.
Though I might quibble a little about whether it was a "dirty lie", or wild speculation very soon after the event before any actual facts came out, which there tends to be an ample amount of after any high-profile event, including the Kirk assassination.
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